at the Creux.

They had none of them cared much for this man. He was not a man to make
close friends. But death had given him a new dignity among them, and the
rough hands lifted him, and bore him to the boat as tenderly as though a
jar or a stumble might add to his pains.

And so, but with slower strokes now, as though that slight additional
burden, that single passenger, weighed them to the water's edge, they
crawl slowly back the way they came, logged, not with water, but with
the presence of death.

The narrow beach between the tawny headlands is black with people. Up
above, on the edge of the cliff, another crowd peers curiously down.

The Senechal is there at the water's edge, Philip Guille of La Ville,
and the Greffier, William Robert, who is also the schoolmaster, and
Thomas Le Masurier the Prevot, and Elie Guille the Constable, and Dr.
Stradling from Dixcart, and the dark-faced, fierce-eyed woman who cannot
keep still, but ranges to and fro in the lip of the tide, and whom they
all know now as the wife--the Frenchwoman, though some of them have
never seen her before.

A buzz runs round as the boat comes slowly past the point of the Laches.
The woman stops her caged-beast walk and stands gazing fiercely at it,
as if she would tear its secret out of it before it touched the shore.

The watchers on the cliff have the advantage. Something like a thrill
runs through them, something between a sigh and a groan breaks from
them.

The woman wades out to meet the boat. She sees and screams, and chokes.
The wives on the beach groan in sympathy.

The body is lifted carefully out and laid on the cool grey stones, and
the woman stands looking at it as a tiger may look at her slaughtered
mate.

"Stand back! Stand back!" cries the Senechal to the thronging crowd; and
to the Constable, "Keep them back, you, Elie Guille!" to which Elie
Guille growls, "Par made, but that's not easy, see you!"

The Doctor straightens up from his brief examination, and says a word to
the Senechal, and to the men about him.

A rough stretcher is made out of a couple of oars and a sail, and the
sombre procession passes through the gloomy old tunnel into the Creux
Road, and wends its way up to the school-house for proper inquiry to be
made as to how Tom Hamon came by his death.

And close behind the stretcher walks the dark-faced woman, with her eyes
like coals of fire, and her dress dragged open as though to stop her
from choking.